Cedric, while it is possible to rig up handwheels and people have done so, there’s a better way. Think of a CNC Mill as a manual mill that has power feeds and DRO’s on every axis. You can set a speed to move via “Jog” or via “MDI” and it’ll move. You can read off the position on the control panel, just like with DRO’s. Using MDI, you can even make it stop at a particular position so you don’t have to watch it like a hawk.

Even better are Conversational CNC Wizards. These let you do quick and dirty g-code generation that mimics operations similar to what you’d do with a Manual Mill. See our article on that here: